Entertainment Essentials: August 24, 2018

Every Friday, NewsCult Entertainment Editor Jeffrey Malone recommends the entertainment essentials of the week – at least three, often more, and usually at least one cinematic and at least one televisual, but it could be ANY combination.

1. Movie: The Happytime Murders (Theatrically Nationwide) – Somebody is murdering a bunch of puppets, and only Melissa McCarthy and an ex-cop puppet private investigator can get to the bottom of it. Along the way, there are some very R-rated gags about puppet sex and puppet mutilation. With its noir-ish Los Angeles of humans living uneasily alongside non-humans, The Happytime Murders is most indebted to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s not quite as polished as that classic, but its humor is wonderfully silly and the craft of its puppetry is marvelously painstaking.

2. Movie: Searching (Limited Theatrically, Expands Nationwide August 31) – Movies presented entirely via computer screens apparently make up an entire genre now, as the mystery thriller Searching takes its place alongside the horror spectacles of the Unfriended films. John Cho is desperately searching for his missing teenage daughter; the storytelling is innovative, and the story itself is classically propulsive.

3. TV: Sharp Objects Finale (August 26 on HBO) – I usually don’t recommend the same show more than once in a short span of time, but Sharp Objects feels like such a different program than it started out as, or perhaps rather, it’s gradually been revealing what it was all along as the season has gone by. At this point, the resolution doesn’t even need to be about who the killer is. We just really need to know how things end up between Camille, Adora, and Amma. Also, will the last opening credits track be able to top “Cupcake Kitty Curls” or last episode’s Annihilation-esque instrumental?

News Cult Entertainment Editor Jeffrey Malone is an entertainment writer/reporter/critic/thinkpiecer/listmaker. He is still working his way through every SNL episode that aired before he was born. He can be reached at [email protected]